The Oracle Forum is a site for users to post product questions to beanswered by Oracle and other members of the community. A while back Ihad a forum created for Grid Engine, and now we're finally announcing it.

You can use the Grid Engine forum to ask questions, report problems, orotherwise seek grid-enabled enlightenment. Sound like the same idea asopen source users list? It largely is, with two main differences.First the forum, being a web site, as opposed to a mailing list, hasmore bells and whistles to sort through the chaos and help keep track ofthe questions and answers that have already been posted. Second,because it's the product forum, it's a great place to pose questionsabout the product, such as about 6.2u6 (which isn't currently availablein the open source).

The Oracle Sample Code site is a place for community members to shareand collaboratively develop things like sample applications, productintegrations, and common utilities. I've created an incubator projectthere for the Grid Engine community to act as a catch-all for usefulcode related to Grid Engine. Over the holidays I will probably work oncoalescing some of my other projects (Passau, Ybbs, etc) onto the site.

My plan for the site is to make it the home for all those scripts thatpeople develop in their day-to-day Grid Engine administration and arewilling to share. Obvious candidates are MPI integrations, file stagingprolog/epilog scripts, transfer queue implementations, and other cleveruses of prologs, epilogs, starter methods, JSVs, load sensors, shepherdwrappers, and whatever other code the rest of the community might finduseful.

Why do we need yet another source code repository? Well, the opensource site is not really structured to facilitate wide opencontribution and collaboration. There's no way to restrict committeraccess for the main source code but leave a contributor section wideopen. With this new site, restrictions will be minimal, because it'sintended to be by the community for the community. Think of it as thesource code corollary to Dag's gridengine.info site.

I'm pretty excited about these two new resources for our community, andI hope you are as well. I'm really looking forward to seeing them putto good use.

Post by templedfWhy do we need yet another source code repository? Well, the opensource site is not really structured to facilitate wide opencontribution and collaboration.

The Son of Grid Engine site <https://arc.liv.ac.uk/trac/SGE> is intendedto allow that (and for potential inclusion in a contrib section of thedistribution), though I haven't been able to set up the necessary spamprotection to open it up (or had time to do various other work -- offersof help welcome). However, it's possible to post contributions to theticket tracker without setting up an account, and you can contributeunder any free licence that's compatible with anything that you modify.

I'm told the site looks too parochial, so it will at least be fronted bySourceforge when I get a chance.

Post by templedfWith this new site, restrictions will be minimal, because it'sintended to be by the community for the community. Think of it as thesource code corollary to Dag's gridengine.info site.

It may not be intentional, but it doesn't look that way. Apart from thefact that you have to set up an Oracle account¹, you have to grant Oraclea licence to exploit code or forum contributions essentially as they seefit. I don't necessarily want to offer that to the community (Icopyleft substantial independent works), let alone to Oracle, who aren'tsharing with the community now. The terms of use of the site are simplydesigned to benefit Oracle as far as I can see, not the community, sadto say.

___¹ I'm not happy about supplying data even as a customer, since Oracledon't seem bothered by data protection issues after sending anothercustomer's information to me and, apparently, sending mine somewhereelse.

--Dave LoveAdvanced Research Computing, Computing Services, University of LiverpoolAKA ***@gnu.org